Google is reportedly in talks with Whatsapp makers to acquire this popular messaging service for around $1 billion. The deal reportedly started four-five weeks ago and both the companies are now negotiating the price for Whatsapp, notes Digital Trends.
According to the report, WhatsApp is giving a bit of a hard time to Google as it is bidding to get a higher acquisition price and the negotiations between the two companies are believed to have been started about four to five weeks ago.
This isn’t the first time when a company is rumored to be in talks to buy out WhatsApp as previously, the social networking giant Facebook was also believed to be in talks with WhatsApp, however, no deal was made.
Google’s attempt to woo WhatsApp actually makes sense, as one area where the company seems to have lagged much behind the competition is mobile messaging. Gtalk, the instant messaging service from Google has failed to keep up with the times and is now a major area of concern for Google.
On the other hand, the rise of Facebook and it’s Facebook Messenger have only made things tougher for Google. Facebook has been quite bullish in enhancing the experience for it’s mobile users and as a part of it’s mobile first strategy, the company now allows the users to sign up for Facebook messenger by just using their phone numbers, eliminating the need for them to have a Facebook account. Facebook Messenger even offers VoIP services to it’s users in the US and the UK.
If Google is indeed successful in acquiring WhatsApp, it will also be a big push for it’s rumored Project Babel as well, wherein the Mountain View company is expected to combine all of it’s messaging services like Google Voice, Google Hangouts, Google Talk under one roof. WhatsApp would surely be a big addition to this project.
Hands down, WhatsApp is surely the most popular cross-platform messaging service at present and is available across all the major platforms like Android, iOS BlackBerry OS (and BlackBerry 10), Series 40, Symbian (S60), and Windows Phone. Though the company rarely talk about it’s user base and usage patterns, but the last good figure we know was that the service processed nearly 18 billion messages on last New Year’s Eve.
We might not have a clear idea about WhatsApp’s revenue, but rumors claim that that company makes about $100 million in revenue.
Report also adds that Whatsapp makers seem to realise their importance and are playing hardball to get a higher acquisition price.
Google, which is rumoured to be working on a unified communication platform ‘Babel,’ could easily integrate Whatsapp in it and it would be one killer communication platform.
Google’s video chat/ hangouts and normal chat services are already used by millions of people and Whatsapp will bring in a lot more users.
For Google, buying Whatsapp makes more sense than building a Whatsapp like service from scratch. This isn’t the first time that Google is approaching Whatsapp and it is also not alone, rumours were circulating arounf very recently that Facebook was in talks with Whatsapp for a possible acquisition.
No other details are available at the moment and we will update the post as soon as we find something else.
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